Hey folks, here is my Feminist Porn Conference talk, which I gave today in a session with Carol Queen and Princess Kali (holy crap). It went pretty darn well, though of course my paper was too long and (as often happens) once I got started I have a difficult time shutting my mouth. Ya know. I get enthusiastic. BTW, if anyone has any idea how to convincingly represent responsive desire in feminist porn, please let me know!

First, a preface regarding the words “male,” “female,” “man,” and “woman:” because a lot of my talk references psychophysiological research conducted almost exclusively on cisgender people, I will very often be using the words “men” and “women” to refer to the cisgendered study participants and the populations they represent, and “male” and “female” to refer to the things their bodies do in those studies. It makes the research problematic before I even start, but representing the science as it is means not representing people as they are. Sorry.

I am a novice at all things media. My academic background is in cognitive science and public health; I have no formal training in women’s studies, gender studies, queer studies, film studies, identity politics, comparative literature, or any of the many academic disciplines that would have been so helpful to me in preparing this talk. The only sentence in which I can use the word “intersectionality” is this one.

What I have, though, is deep knowledge of female sexual physiology, and a lot of experience helping emerging adults uproot the bullshit planted in their sexual psychologies by a culture that would have them believe they are broken. I speak to you today as a sex educator looking for help in teaching young women about how their bodies work.

Feminist porn has powerful potential as a tool for supporting women in developing a positive relationship with their own bodies; the link between sexually explicit media and health education is far from new – such an overlap reaches at least as far back as the seventeenth century and probably much farther – hence the imprecations by authors of many early sex manuals not to misconstrue the contents as salacious, when their intent is purely medical and spiritual. Feminist porn does not vary from the seventeenth century in this overlap between sex education and erotic content. Nor alas – and this is the crux of my message today – does it vary in three crucial aspects of its representation of the sexual behavior of female bodies.

There was then and there is now what Lisa Diamond calls (in a different context) a “master narrative” around human sexual functioning, borne of clinical models and patriarchy in science. The narrative goes something like this:

First, you want some sex. So you pursue sex. Second, when you get some sex, your body does some predictable things – male bodies get an erection and female bodies get wet, for a start.

And third, when you get to the penis-in-vagina part, you have an orgasm.

I’ll be calling this the want-get-fuck-come model, and it equally describes the tropes of porn and the tropes of romance novels, want-get-fuck-come. This is not just a narrative of deliberate behavior; it is a narrative of physiology. The narrative has evolved over centuries in the west, with gradual transformation of who does the wanting and pursuing, and feminist porn has taken a radical position on who can pursue sex, the kinds of activities people can engage in to generate arousal, and what goes into a vagina.

However.

Everything about this narrative is a pretty reasonable description of about 80% of men, and the narrative certainly emerged based on male sexual experience – indeed it was written by and for men. And it’s a pretty reasonable description of about 20% of women. It creates no space for the experiences of the overwhelming majority of people living in female bodies.

And yet the master narrative is so entrenched that my students, blog readers, and even fellow sex educators often believe that they are sexually broken when they fail to conform to the narrative.

But they are not broken; mostly, they are women.

So I watched a buncha feminist porn, looking for the other 80% of women’s narratives; I made a spreadsheet of more than 50 scenes. And what I found – well, I found a lot of things, not least of which is that queer porn stars are the opera singers of sex work, combining the physical power of dancers and athletes, with the emotional depth of the actors and the creative mastery of the greatest improvisational musicians.

But for the purposes of this paper, what I found was that feminist porn queers the master narrative.

It does not write a different narrative.

So I’m here, first, to tell you what the science has to say about the master narrative with respect to female sexual functioning, and, second, to ask that that the female narrative – or narratives – be represented.

So now I’ll put on my sex educator hat and talk to you about what I will loosely call “women’s sexuality,” specifically retelling the want-get-fuck-come narrative.

1. “First, you want some sex, so you go get some sex.”

Roughly 30-60% of women and 5-20% of men typically want sex only after the getting begins, and rarely want sex just out of the blue. These folks don’t have “low” desire. They don’t suffer from any ailment, they don’t long to initiate but feel like they’re not allowed to. Their bodies just need some more compelling reason than “That’s an attractive person right there,” to want sex.Researchers Ellen Laan and Stephanie Both call this “responsive” desire, in contrast to “spontaneous” desire. Sex therapist Susanne Iasenzza calls it “willingness” in contrast to “wanting.” And my students call it “openness,” in contrast to “eagerness.”

In the many studies of desire, there is no relationship between desire style and arousability or orgasm. These are sexually satisfied women, in healthy relationships. What this research tell us is that lack of spontaneous interest in sex is not, in itself, dysfunctional or problematic in any way.

What’s going on here has to do with where arousal and desire come from.

Your central nervous system, including your sexual response mechanism, is made up of a partnership of “brakes” and “gas.”

The Sexual Excitation System (SES) is the “gas pedal” of your sexual response. It receives information about “sexually relevant stimuli” in the environment – things you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine – and sends signals from the brain to the genitals to tell them, “Turn on!” SES is constantly scanning the environment (including your own thoughts and feelings) for things that are sexually relevant. It is constantly at work, far below the level of consciousness.

The Sexual Inhibition System (SIS) is your sexual brake. “Inhibition” here doesn’t mean “shyness,” but rather neurological “off” signals. Just as SES scans the environment for turn-ons, SIS scans from turn-offs – things you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, or imagine, which your brain interprets as a good reason not to be aroused right now. And all day long it sends a steady stream of “Turn off!” messages to your genitals. SIS is the system that slams on the brakes if, in the middle of some nookie, your grandmother walks in the room.

Each of us has both mechanisms and each of us has different sensitivities of SIS and SES, which leads to different “arousability” – that is, your potential to be aroused by sexually relevant stimuli. As I tell my students over and over, we’re all made of the same parts, just organized in different ways. The variation is distributed on a nice bell curve; most of us are heaped up in the middle, average joes and janes and jesses, and a few people are at the extreme ends.

Folks with more sensitive gas pedals and less sensitive brakes end up with a “spontaneous” desire style under most circumstances, because their readily-stimulated SES activates sexual attention in response to lower levels of stimulation. Folks with less sensitive gas pedals and more sensitive brakes are more likely to have a responsive desire style most of the time, because it takes a greater amount of more direct stimulation of the excitation system to generate interest and desire. There’s a lot more to this than I’ve described – for example the importance of situational and emotional context – but my paper is already 1,000 words too long.

Responsive desire is totally normal – it’s a desire style made of the same parts as spontaneous desire, just organized in a slightly different way.But when people don’t know that responsive desire is normal, they begin to feel that they are broken, dysfunctional, because the master narrative privileges “spontaneous” desire; indeed I’m certain that some of you are thinking that responsive desire must be a product of cultural inhibition and if people were more free they’d want sex more spontaneously. That’s partly right for some people, but largely wrong for many people. I don’t have time to explain why, so come have a drink with me after and I will.

There are complications of consent that may be involved in representing responsive desire in feminist porn; it makes “enthusiastic consent” less obvious. But I admit I kinda sorta expected feminist porn to be interested in that kind of challenge, so I was amazed to find that responsive desire narratives are a miniscule minority of the stories I found in feminist porn.

2. “Second, when you get some sex, your body does predictable things.”

What a person’s body (and in particular a woman’s body) is doing is not necessarily an indication of their mental state. This is generally known among researchers and not controversial – it appears there is roughly a 60-85% correlation between what a penis is doing and how aroused the person feels, and about a 15-30% correlation between what a vagina is doing and how aroused the person feels. It’s called non-concordant arousal, and it’s normal.

I will illustrate with two examples, both true:

When I was in college, my friend – I’ll call her Amanda – told me this story about a guy she had been seeing for several months, with whom she was experimenting for the first time with power and domination. She said:

“I let him tie my wrists above my head while I was standing up, and he positioned me so that I was straddling this bar that pressed against my vulva. And then he went away! He just left for a while and it was totally boring, and when he came back I was like, ‘I’m not into this.’ He looked at the bar and he looked at me and he said, ‘Then why are you wet?’ And I was so confused because I definitely wasn’t into it, but my body was definitely not responding.”

I didn’t know what to say. Because, like everyone who has ever read a sexy romance novel, I knew that wet = aroused. Desirous. Wanting it. Being “ready” for sex. So what could it mean that my friend’s body was saying one thing and her brain was saying something else?

This wasn’t sexy yes-but-no like in romance novels, where the heroine really does want the hero but insists that she “shouldn’t;” Amanda really just didn’t feel turned on or desirous at all. What was going on?

The question haunted me, and I didn’t learn the answer for years.It came in time for me to help my sister. She called me one day and said, “I don’t always get wet when I’m turned on, and so my husband thinks I’m just humoring him, but I’m not. Am I broken? Should I see a doctor? Is it hormonal? What’s wrong?”

“Oh I see. This is actually really common. Sometimes bodies don’t respond with genital arousal in a way that matches mental experience. Tell him to listen to your words, not your fluids, and also buy some lube.”

The vagina is not an “unambiguous agent of sincerity,” as Alain de Botton called it. It’s a reproductive canal. It can’t be sincere any more than your elbows can be sincere. The greater (but not perfect) correlation between male genital response and experience makes people think that’s what’s “normal,” but it’s really not even half the story.

And yet, in the scenes on my spreadsheet, there were many instances of people saying, “I’m so wet” or “You’re so wet” as an indication of pleasure and arousal. There was plenty of use of lube used, but no indication that the lube was a counterbalance a lack of lubrication on the part of the vagina involved. There were even instances of the dreaded, “You’re a liar, I can tell how much you want it because of how wet you are.” Feminist porn appears not to have even TRIED to queer this one.

Genital response is not consent. Genital response isn’t even desire or pleasure. Hell, it isn’t even arousal, in the way most people think about it. Genital response is genital response, and it deserves vastly less of a place than it’s given in representations of sexual functioning.

3. “Third, when you get to the penis-in-vagina part, you have an orgasm.”

Look, this is a room full of feminists. I don’t have to tell you about the clitoris. It is the hokey pokey: it’s what it’s all about. It’s two turn tables and a microphone: it’s where it’s at. It’s Visa: everywhere you want to be.

Two sets of facts:

First: about 25% of women are reliably orgasmic from “unassisted penetration.” The rest are sometimes, almost never, or never orgasmic from penetration. This number has been replicated multiple times in studies spanning about a hundred years, with amazingly little variation, in multiple research methodologies. For a review, see Elisabeth Lloyd’s relentlessly precise, Case of the Female Orgasm.

Second: more than 90% of women who masturbate do so with little or no vaginal penetration. This number too has been replicated multiple times through multiple methodologies in multiple studies, including both Kinsey’s female volume and the Hite report.

The clitoris really is the hokey pokey, and I mean like woah.And yet, in all that porn I watched, fewer than 10% of the orgasms among people with vaginas were penetration-free? Most of them were combined penetration and clitoral stimulation and some of them were penetration alone, but out of 50 scenes, only a handful featured orgasms without penetration at all, and only five did not involve any penetration. Jackie Strano, in an interview about feminist porn earlier this week, actually began with this definition: Feminist Porn is when the partner getting penetrated has a fully embodied orgasm.”

Essentially, what I see in feminist porn is that the traditional role of penetrator and penetratee has been queered in terms of gender, but penetration itself has not been queered. Feminist porn has abstracted penetration, allowing fingers and fists and dildos to take the place of penises. This seems to me analogous to religious ceremonies that used to involve actual animal sacrifice, and now involve only the symbolic sacrifice of a model or image of the animal. Animal or model, it’s still a superstition, you see what I’m saying? Sorry about that analogy.

To Conclude:

The want-get-fuck-come narrative is a patriarchal narrative that the last twenty years of psychophysiological research has shown to be an inadequate description of the overwhelming majority female sexual functioning.

A female narrative can put those four verbs in just about any order (get fuck want come, want get come fuck), it can eliminate some altogether (want get come, get want fuck), it can repeat some almost indefinitely (want get come come fuck come come). The stories are more complex, more interwoven with the non-sexual domains of life, and less directly related to peripheral factors (i.e., genital response).

I know that porn is a fantasy. But feminist porn surely is feminist fantasy, a woman- and queer-friendly response to the monoculture fantasy of mainstream porn. A feminist fantasy could and maybe should be a celebration of the biodiversity of women – our various shapes, sizes, colors, abilities, gender expressions. So it surprised me how many of the female orgasms in feminist porn are penetration-centric, how rarely a responsive character might begin desire after stimulation, and how much credence is given to the “I’m so wet” school of arousal.

A particularly weird thing I noticed is that porn that accepts the label “feminist” mostly seems to make a choice between mainstream bodies and mainstream physiology. Either you get culturally sanctioned beauty and cisgender heterosexuality with contexty stories with penetration-free pussy eating (Candida Royalle, Erika Lust), or genderqueer every body obeying the want-get-fuck-come narrative (Crash Pad Series, Indie Porn Revolution). I don’t know what to make of that. Maybe you do. Drinks after.

Again, I’m a novice at all things media. For all I know, the feminist porn audience is clamoring for stories about people of all bodies and genders who just want sex, ravenously, instantly, and incessantly. For all I know you have abundant consumer data, quantitative and qualitative, that tells you that penetration is the only thing that sells and when you reduce penetration, you reduce revenue. For all I know, the people who watch feminist and queer porn are all among the vaginally orgasmic minority, with a spontaneous desire style and unfailingly wet vaginas. And it might be that the challenge of telling a story about responsive desire is too complex, that what feminist porn wants to be is linear and easy and comfortable and familiar. As I said at the start, I’m not the person who knows anything about the media or sociocultural anything.

If feminist porn is about complicating representations of identities and desires, then I am here to raise my hand and say, “Can it also complicate representations of desire, arousal, and orgasm?”

Can we make space in the stories told in feminist porn, not just for all the variety of how our bodies look and what we choose to do with them, but also for all the variety of how our bodies work? Can feminist porn tell stories of a responsive desire partner who wants to want sex and works to figure out what context will create that? Can I see a cisgender woman told, “But you’re wet! You must be ready!” and then she tells that person to listen to her words? Can I see lots and lots and lots of clit-centric orgasms? I’m not even talking about representations of dysfunction and unsatisfying sex – just a variety of kinds of functional, healthy, dare I say it, “normal” sexual functioning. Normal is a vast and hilly landscape, and I think all of it belongs in feminist porn.

I don’t want to minimize the revolutionary inclusivity of much of feminist porn. The bodies, identities, sex acts, and consent represented are incomparably superior to those represented in mainstream porn and in the “master narrative.” I just want to add the variety of healthy human – and especially female – sexual desire, arousal, and orgasm – to the growing list of diversitiies that receive respectful representation in feminist porn.

Emily, great article. I’ve never watched porn so can’t comment on that aspect of it, but it’s damn good to read more about receptive desire being legitimate desire – in fact just as normal and real as what’s considered the male norm. Not that I’ve ever felt broken, only wondered occasionally if I’m too passive. (Not during sex, I mean, just in being receptive more often than initiative.)

I think this is a typo: “… And I was so confused because I definitely wasn’t into it, but my body was definitely not responding.”

Shouldn’t that read “my body was definitely responding”? As it is, it seems to contradict the point about genital response not reflecting mental response.

Well said. I really hope you opened eyes and minds with this one, because it would be a relief for a new narrative to start that took the pressure off bodies and mirrored for people to allow sex, however the bodies involved respond on a given day.
It’s pretty cool to hear you advocating for my own personal responsive style like this. 🙂 Thank you.

I have learned so much from this blog, and this talk nicely packages much of it together in one place. Great talk, and thanks for posting.

But, now I have a question, or rather, maybe a blog post topic suggestion. As a woman or as an educator, what do you do with this information in a world where the master narrative prevails? What would you say to a woman who is very firmly in the responsive desire camp, and is also mostly introverted in personality? How does that person communicate her “openness” in a world that looks for “eagerness”? I wonder what you tell you students about this sort of thing.

I just wrote the longest, most pedantic comment ever. So I’m not going to post that. 🙂

Instead I’ll just say that the popularity of, say, gay-male coupling consumed mainly by young straight women as well as similar “lesbian” porn consumed by young men suggests that what people look for in porn rarely resembles their own experience or sex. Or even preference.

Further, for anthropologists and researchers the trap for porn is that it’s consumed almost exclusively by people already somewhere in the (in bias-reducing alphabetical order) come/fuck/get/want verb set. And in both consumer intention and audience it’s probably going to be overwhelmingly narrative. Oh, and chosen by consumers for its operatic- or kabuki-stylized for maximum “impact” rather than veracity. And it probably tends towards “come” last because that’s most often what consumers are trying to do when they choose to consume it.

So anyway, yeah. Sounds like your spreadsheet really drives home the point that porn is not sex education! Any more than Wagner is a good historian of the Germanic people or Mozart is a good biographer of barbers in Seville.

Consequently a) it would be very nice if all porn came with a disclaimer “this is not sex education.” and b) that porn would need such disclaimers while opera does not suggests we really do need a heck of a lot more actual sex education.

The discussion that followed all our talks spent some time on this question of how what’s fun to watch is different from what’s fun to do, and I am, I readily acknowledge, totally out of my depth there. All I know is my students watch this stuff and they definitely, explicitly, unambiguously tell me that they believe that what they’re seeing is what’s typical for people. They tell me they believe that if ANYWHERE is going to show them what else there is to sex, it’s feminist porn. And feminist porn does not do that.

I don’t think porn has any obligation to be anything but hot; but I think it has an OPPORTUNITY to do more – though it’s not at all clear to me how it would approach the stuff I wrote about. Tristan Taoromino asked really important questions about HOW you can show responsive desire or non-concordant arousal. Video is a visual medium, and these are internal, physiological experiences. How do you show it? I have no idea.

If the problem is primarily a logistical one – i.e. how do you show internal states with a visual medium than it would be interesting to see if there are romance novels/erotica which manage since they would not have the same level of technical challenges – an author can give a window into characters thoughts.

“All I know is my students watch this stuff and they definitely, explicitly, unambiguously tell me that they believe that what they’re seeing is what’s typical for people.”

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! This remains my biggest nightmare! That they would think feminist porn any more realistic than standard industrial porn is just setting them up for further bafflement. (Not least because actual feminist porn can be anything from mainstream industrial created by women directors to NOW-style prim neo-Victorian period pieces to radical period pieces, to… in other words no less agenda-free, or representative, than Bob Guccione’s porn was.)

The one good thing about feminists is it might be possible to persuade them to include “expert drivers on closed track” style disclaimers at the beginning or end of their pieces. Or at least “your mileage may vary!” That’s one possibility that I doubt industrial pornographers would ever consider.

One thing my husband pointed out: in his experience, when having sexy times with women, they WANTED the cock, they were vocal about their desire for P-in-V, and were disappointed, even grumpy when they didn’t get it. It didn’t matter whether or not they were capable/likely to have an orgasm from penetration, they still wanted the cock.

I feel I should add he said this with wide eyes, and almost shock – this was not a reaction he was expecting!

Something I am curious about: when you were looking at feminist porn, how many of the scenes that involved P-in-V ALSO had clitoral stimulation? Because, as a hetero female, I want both damnit, and I don’t think I’m the only one. Just something to think about.

Yes, Tristan T. called this the “cock hungry slut” archetype, and it goes back at LEAST as far as the seventeenth century. It’s a solidly – possibly intractably – established trope that serves male sexual pleasure extremely well, and it has an obvious place in mainstream porn, whose target audience is, after all, men. There’s a very entertaining book called Schooling Sex (http://www.amazon.com/Schooling-Sex-Libertine-Literature-Education/dp/0199254265) that recounts how early modern sex manuals and erotic stories both asserted that just the sight of a large erect penis was enough to make a woman desire sex.

I mentioned combined stimulation in the paper, but I can add that it was probably the most common stimulation to orgasm, followed by penetration alone, with clitoral alone a distant third. The porn I happened to include didn’t involve much in the way of anal, but I know that there is plenty of feminist porn that also includes anal (penetration) stimulated orgasm.

What’s tough about the “cock hungry slut” designation is that it really does kind of marginalize that 25% of women who do report reliably having orgasms through penetration “alone.” (Note: duh, almost always this still involves clitoral grinding against the partner’s pubic bone, which you also almost never see in porn because the camera can’t see it that way.)

25% is a pretty big number. Include the number who like combinations and penetration stops looking so much like a bizarre aberration.

That doesn’t mean, incidentally, that I think we should cheerily embrace it. Let alone embrace it in porn.

Instead a better way to look at the question might be “how is penetration represented in male-centric or more-generally phallocentric porn, literature, and education?” Because my admittedly anecdotal experience of female-centric penetration is that it can be much desired but very different from male-centric penetration.

One more dig if I may. I think the “cock-hungry slut” trope is a hugely male one, referencing enjoyment of the humpy-pumpy high-friction, long-stroke penetration that’s really good at producing men’s orgasms. But it’s by no means the only kind of penetration! I’m pretty sure porn… at least feminist porn… could spend a little more time emphasizing the use of penetration used by women who have pressure, stretching, and/or bearing-down orgasms. With or without “typical” clitoral stimulation.

(Note: without that friction it can be very difficult for men to come “simultaneously” with partners who enjoy this kind of stimulation. And in porn, in particular, there’s a huge problem helping male actors maintain their erections! Another reason, btw, that I think we see so much emphasis on male-centric intercourse and fellatio. Erections are often… um… hard! difficult!)

Note: encouraging porn that reflects all the ways people who get off on penetration can get off — instead of just the way stereotypical erection-anxious male porn actors get off — wouldn’t particularly help anyone for whom penetration is an active distraction. Nor obviously would it address the main question of how to present responsive rather than spontaneous desire in porn. But! In terms of representing penetration in non-“cock-hungry slut” fashion it would be a welcome anodyne.

One last thing, also from personal observation: I think Sherri Hite herself pointed out that a lot of women who appreciate penetration still don’t do it while masturbating because for most women it’s a long reach and not always comfortable to do from commonly preferred positions. I mention this only because of the percentage differences between orgasms with penetration during intercourse vs. masturbation. Not (duh!) because I think penetration is “right” or “best” or, especially, to my personal-male advantage.

As someone who loves porn but is dissatisfied with most of the options out there, I love this. Even though the kind of porn I’m looking for isn’t any of the specific kinds you mentioned – the message of “we need more variety & better representations of different types of desire” resonates deeply. Especially with the caveats that “realistic” and “average” aren’t the same – we want to see HOT sex and BETTER THAN AVERAGE sex but we also want to see POSSIBLE sex. When people talk about “porn for women” (which is NOT the same thing as “feminist porn” but there is some overlap) they expect everyone to want soft focus, long shots, plot, romance, emphasis on feelings, blah blah blah. That’s not at ALL what I want.

The current “porn for men” is actually pretty darned close to what I want with three major changes:
1) I want attractive men. Seriously, the men in porn-for-men are mostly awful.
2) I want people who actually look like they’re horny for each other, not bored. And yes, for me personally I do mean that in the “spontaneous desire” sense. Responsive desire is just not my bag, baby!
3) I want to skip the subtle degradation and slut-shaming. It’s hard to pin down exactly what that means and it’s not like ALL men’s porn includes that, but it’s a pretty common thread.
And that’s about it.

I don’t want plot – that’s just wasting my time, I’m watching this to get off
I don’t want romance and emotions – that’s just wasting my time, I’m watching this to get off
I DO want anal sex, oral sex, vaginal sex, close ups of thrusting action and money shots – yeah, I really get off on the “pearl necklace” trope.
I do want roughness, tit grabbing, ass slapping, dirty talk – and how you do all of those things without edging over into “degradation” is a difficult thing to define, but it can be done.

Anyway, that’s just the take of one girl who has been consuming porn since high school, usually more frequently and avidly than my male partners. And despite those couple of decades of watching and buying porn I still haven’t found much of the type that I REALLY like.

Me too, Christa! And penises. I really like penises. I can see that it’s a bit silly focusing only on penetration, but penises are great and I like to see them, much like many men probably like to see boobs. Innovative ways with penises in porn would be lovely; why only see them disappearing into somebody’s orifices when they can be used in all sorts of ways?

Kinky porn can be a useful substitute for ‘responsive desire’; the submissive partner gets turned on after things happen to them. It would be nice to have that without all the insults though.

I may be missing something, but it sounds to me like there’s an assumption in all this that the point of sex is orgasms.

For me, this is definitely not true. For me, the sense of love, intimacy, trust, caring, tenderness, etc., aren’t just prerequisites for sex, they’re kind of the point of it. Without them, sex and orgasms are truly just bodily functions, like peeing. While I wouldn’t choose to never have an orgasm again, some of the most enjoyable and memorable sex I’ve ever had didn’t involve me having an orgasm, and if I had to choose between love, intimacy, etc., and orgasms, I’d choose the love, etc.

I’m sort of the opposite of the previous poster (Christa @6): if there were a porn that I would be interested in, it would focus on all the stuff that goes on _before_ and _after_ the orgasms: how the people relate, what they feel, what motivates them, etc.

AMM – thank God for a decent response! I can’t imagine sex for just sexes sake. How boring (and yes I’ve experienced it). Without the – I’ll use the old fashioned terms – foreplay or after play – and all the emotions (love, caring, tenderness….) what’s the point? Knowing my partner cares for me is the greatest turn on.